Isn't Dame Helen Mirren a bit posh for Brighton Rock?

I was delighted hear that Graham Greene's novel Brighton Rock is to be made into a new film later this year – for any fan of one of the darkest and most thrilling English novels of the 20th century, this is exciting news. But I began to have my doubts when I heard that 1) Dame Helen Mirren will play Ida Arnold 2) the film is to be set in 1964 and 3) the BBC is in charge of the project.

Hermione Baddeley as Ida Arnold at the Brighton races (1947 film version)

One thing at a time. Firstly, I have nothing against Helen Mirren. Indeed, she is the foremost British actress of her generation and fully deserved her Oscar for The Queen. But Ida Arnold – the heroine in Brighton Rock – is a buxom middle-aged bar wench. She's more Jade Goody than Jane Tennison, one of Mirren's most celebrated TV roles. Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of Greene's novel, where we meet Ida for the first time:

Somewhere out of sight a woman was singing, 'When I came up from Brighton by the train': a rich Guinness voice, a voice from a public bar. Hale turned into the private saloon and watched her big blown charms across two bars and through a glass partition.

She wasn't old, somewhere in the late thirties or early forties, and she was only a little drunk in a friendly accommodating way. You thought of sucking babies when you looked at her, but if she'd borne them she hadn't let them pull her down: she took care of herself. Her lipstick told you that, the confience of her big body. She was well-covered, but she wasn't careless; she kept her lines for those cared for lines.

Does that sound to you like Helen Mirren? OK, I'm beginning to sound like one of those bores who won't let anyone adapt their favourite book with anything but precise loyalty to the text (a position which James Delingpole quite rightly dispatched in a recent Spectator Column). But who played Ida Arnold in the 1947 version of the film? Hermione Baddely (see pic above, watch this video or this one). She was the right sort: a loud cackle and a cockney gob to go with it… But perhaps Dame Helen will prove me wrong.

Secondly, the new film is to be set, according to this Telegraph report, in "the world of Mods and Rockers" – Brighton, 1964. I have to ask why? Greene's novels are as good as screenplays already. He even wrote the actual screenplay of the 1947 film. The director Rowan Joffe has justified the change by saying that the story feels too modern. It's "too vibrant and too relevant to be contained in the late Thirties", he said. What utter balls. The racing scenes, the pier and the arcades, the marching bands, the cabaret, the sharp suits and old-school gangsterism – the 1930s setting didn't "contain" the story one bit.

Perhaps it's just the BBC being the BBC. I wonder, lastly, how they will portray Pinkie, the evil 17-year-old villain who slashes his victims with a razor blade? It's the tension between Pinkie and Ida that will make or break the film: that he is a "Roman" (Catholic) with an idea of salvation and damnation, while Ida is down-to-earth and with only a sense of what's right and what's wrong. As J.M. Coetzee wrote in a recent introduction to the novel: "In the end the story belongs not to Ida but to Rose and Pinkie, for they are prepared, in however juvenile a way, to confront ultimate questions, while she is not". Despite Pinkie's horrific crimes, in other words, his Catholicism – even if he is damned – trumps Ida's modern sense of morality. And that, I've decided, is why I won't like this film. Not in a million years would the BBC know how to make that work.